{"id":2711,"date":"2021-06-08T16:56:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-08T14:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=2711"},"modified":"2021-11-05T10:32:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-05T09:32:05","slug":"it-took-1000-hours-to-write-handmade-pixels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2021\/06\/08\/it-took-1000-hours-to-write-handmade-pixels\/","title":{"rendered":"It took 1000 hours to write my book Handmade Pixels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was waiting for the pandemic to blow over before thinking about time management again, but it looks like there will be no simple global endpoint, so here goes. I hope this is useful for other potential writers.<\/em><\/p>\n

How long does it take to write a book? I must confess I had no idea, but writing Handmade Pixels<\/a> took me 1000 hours over the course of 4\u00bd years. I had already written a paper on independent games in\u00a02014, but it wasn’t until August 2015 that I decided to write the book that became Handmade Pixels<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Associate professor jobs like mine with dedicated research time are unfathomably privileged and increasingly scarce, yet even people like me will complain of not having time to do research. I use a time tracker to figure out where my time goes, and this lets me see how much time I spent on this book. It’s not an exact science – sometimes I’d work on something else that drifted into the project, and sometimes I’d be interrupted while working.<\/p>\n

Results<\/strong>: I clocked a total of 983 hours which were distributed like this (click to zoom):\"Bar<\/a>As you can see, only 2\/3 of the time\u00a0was spent in the earnest book-writing phase – after signing a contract and before publishing. Especially copyediting, proofs, and promotion took much more time than you’d intuitively expect.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, most of the time I only just managed to work on the book around 20-30 hours a month. My contract technically says that I can (should\/should be able to) research 60 hours per month, but I only exceeded that twice. For most months, there were apparently always enough other things happening for me to spend that much time on the book.<\/p>\n

This is also the largest book project I’ve done, and I surely couldn’t have done it without my assistant Dooley Murphy<\/a>, or without the good support of MIT Press and my editor Doug Sery.<\/p>\n

Finding the time<\/h3>\n

I was positively unsure if I could<\/em> write this book on my regular work schedule. My first three books were all written on considerable chunks of free time (Half-Real: <\/em>my PhD, A Casual Revolution: <\/em>6 months off, Art of Failure: <\/em>a 6-month grant), so could I even write a book during my regular schedule of teaching, meeting, supervising, and being the head of an educational program? I also have kids, and my productivity drops vertically if I am sleep-deprived, so working late does not make me more productive.<\/p>\n

After a million days of never getting to the research I cared about, I’ve settled on the classic writer routine<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Go to the office.<\/li>\n
  2. Get a cup of coffee.<\/li>\n
  3. Write till noon without checking email or social media.<\/li>\n
  4. Let the world of emails and meetings wash over me.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This was the best choice imaginable. Of course, it wasn’t always possible to evade other responsibilities in the morning – there were lots of days where I failed – but it at least felt like a pattern, and let me get a continuity of working on the project almost every workday. I probably did around 10 late nights for the entire project, and none after midnight. Not because I didn’t have to, but simply because staying up late would make me miserable without speeding up the project at all.<\/p>\n

    Motivation<\/h3>\n

    Some people have asked me how I find the motivation to not go on social media or do other short-term tasks when I am supposed to write, and I am not always successful at that. I do find it useful though to think very hard about how a given activity makes me feel<\/em>: if I randomly go on social media or check email, it makes me feel terrible & life feel meaningless, while starting my day with research makes me feel great and my life feel meaningful. (There is a good podcast on thinking about “how does it make you feel<\/a>“.) It’s a bit like the idea of getting drunk on champagne in the morning – on some level it sounds great, but in practice you know it will feel terrible. So you try to do the thing that will make you feel better.<\/p>\n

    Structure<\/h3>\n

    Writing is often very solitary, so habits are very idiosyncratic. I personally don’t have daily goals like word counts, but I have very long TODO lists, describing things I need to read, games I need to play, screenshots I need to take, interviews I need to edit, paragraphs that need to be linked, arguments that need to be sharpened, and so on. For a writing session, I just want to check off some checkboxes. I keep the list of checked tasks around so I can see my progress. I also make new tasks just to check them.<\/p>\n

    Fast or slow?<\/h3>\n

    Is 1000 hours fast or slow? I really have no idea. I am probably somewhere in the middle. I know of writers faster than me, and writers who take more time than I do.<\/p>\n

    This is what I learned from writing Handmade Pixels<\/em>. If you want to write, I hope there will be time for you to do so as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was waiting for the pandemic to blow over before thinking about time management again, but it looks like there will be no simple global endpoint, so here goes. I hope this is useful for other potential writers. How long does it take to write a book? I must confess I had no idea, but … Continue reading “It took 1000 hours to write my book Handmade Pixels”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-my_publications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2711"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2842,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2711\/revisions\/2842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}